Beware

I have written about Dory Previn here before. Beside co-writing the gloriously bad score for Valley of the Dolls and the less camp and catchy "Come Saturday Morning", she wrote what is perhaps the best song about Mia Farrow who would run off with her husband and collaborator Andre Previn. For years I've heard about "Beware of Young Girls" but had never actually heard it. Lo and behold, there was Dory's angry early solo effort On My Way to Where with that very tune on it for a mere 150 pennies at the Community Thrift Store this afternoon. Really, who needs a Virgin Megastore's V.I.P. plan when you have this incredible resource?

The often cited irony, of course, was that this tune would prove more than prophetic for Mia when her own adopted daughter would replay the drama Dory outlined in the early 1970s some two decades later.

Totally unrelated but of greater musical interest is rediscovering Joe Venuti in Chicago, 1978 which features tunes such as "Samba de Orpheus" when old Joe was 75. I remember the bewildered look of the clerk at Wilcox Records when I bought this disc back then, wondering why someone so young would have an interest in something so seemingly archaic. Maybe it's just me, but I'd say it holds up better than, say, the albums of Starship from the same era.

Listening to these tracks, it's hard to believe that old Joe would kick the bucket shortly after making this recording. Sadly, Dory, who is either 78 or 83 depending on what sources you follow, is close to being at the same point and hasn't recorded anything in decades. Beware, indeed.

Sunday Morning, Sunday Morning

The perfect Sunday morning, to me, involves getting up reasonably early (I've never done well with sleep in late types), devouring the Times, especially if it involves some thick arts preview section, the perfect coffee and a pastry I had the foresight to garner the previous afternoon and a favorite chanteuse of my childhood or before. Actually I've often been conflicted about whether I have a significant other that wants to share that time with me. If he sleeps in late, I usually immediately label him as a low energy loser. If he wants to chatter and get up in my space, he's considered too clingy since this time is about my news and my music not that annoying lovey dovey stuff. Life's too short, you know.

I've long outgrown the Billie Holiday Gloomy Sunday phase. A good example is Margo Guryan, whose work I knew for years but discovered as a performer only recently. Being the author of Sunday Morning, she's obviously fits that bill perfectly. Male singers are more of a weekday, get motivated thing. I'm already planning to have Lee Hazelwood serenade me with "Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight..." first thing tomorrow. (Sadly, Lee left us on August 4 of this year, and we lost one of the most amazing voices of all time. When I was about six years old and heard his voice for the first time, it was the first time it hit me that I wanted to have men in my life as more than science teachers and baseball coaches.)

Undoubtedly it was Friday's premier of Junk Thief TV - Season Two with the Dory Previn penned lyric for I'll Grow My Own Tree that has been trashed along with MacArthur Park as being the worst pop lyrics of all time. I'll agree that the metaphor of the solitary tree, not one in a row, and that poor soggy cake with its dripping green icing are pretty atrocious but still so compelling with their fearless bombast. So I started my morning with my three original vinyl issues of Dory's. Dory has gained recent hip cache as the titular subject of a Camera Obscura ditty. She really doesn't fit the mold of the quintessential '70s chick singer cliches. Carol King may have evolved from Brill Building pop, but Dory evolved from having written some of the worst celluloid tunes of the mid-1960s, or at least those in some of the most bizarre musical sequences in what were essentially big musical numbers in non-musical. Besides the aforementioned tree tune, that was represented by that enormous star-hiding mobile in Valley of the Dolls, she also wrote You're Going to Hear from Me from Inside Daisy Clover that has to be one of the weirdest faux musical numbers ever committed to the big screen. After a breakdown when husband Andre ran off with Mia Farrow, she wrote the prophetic Beware of Young Girls that was intended to chronicle their triangle but could more aptly be a foreshadowing of the Mia-Woody-Soon Yi triangle. As most people under 50 today would think of Mia as an elderly eccentric and would have trouble envisioning that she was ever a jail bait siren. Although I always knew Dory was a bit older than most of gals of the Joni-Carly-Carol era, I was really shocked to discover that she's about to turn 82. Dang, that makes cranky old Joni seem pretty dern young and spry by comparison. And I was also pleased to realize how non-characteristic her stuff is of the era. There's definitely no You've Got a Friend or Woman of Heart and Mind here. A woman that would have tunes with pretty self-explanatory titles like Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister? and The Obscene Phone Call on the same album has to be admired for showing even more audacity than she showed when writing about that dang tree that was not one in a row. Dory had an incredibly bizarre, tragic childhood with a father who suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, and she performed with a razor blade in her mouth as a child performer, all chronicled in her 1976 book Midnight Baby. She also suffered through electro-shock therapy.

Ultimately her latter work falls into the sphere of angst-spewing public therapy that I thought was really cool as a teen before I'd been assaulted by so much of it. Dory was the perfect soundtrack for my high school years when I thought I was really with it by hanging out with my cousin Ginger's proto-feminist, men bashing friends whom I probably followed just to sneak a peak at their copies of the original Viva magazine. Sadly, my fantasy of them feature a spread of Lee Hazelwood never materialized.

Sadly, most of the songs aren't ones I really want to hear on repeated listening, and I'll probably be fine if I don't pull those Dory discs out again until, say 2015 or so. I was also sad to hear that she's suffered strokes recently and is in poor health. I hope she has a good 82nd on October 22, and I will always think of her when I hear the term "Reflections in a Mud Puddle."